ACLU says Muslims face more scrutiny for citizenship

US Citizenship and Immigration Services routinely screens immigrants for national security concerns, blacklists Muslims and has delayed applications of thousands of legal US residents for years, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU obtained documents about a government program that makes
it more difficult – and sometimes impossible – for Muslims to
gain naturalized US citizenship. Under the Controlled Application
Review and Resolution Program (CARRP), federal immigration
officials are instructed to find ways to delay and deny
applicants from Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian
countries.

To delay or deny US citizenship, officials will flag
discrepancies or claim that they did not receive sufficient
information from an immigrant, the ACLU reports.

“Your file goes into a black hole, and you’re stuck unless you
have the money to hire a lawyer to sue the government,”
Margaret Stock, an Alaska-based immigration attorney who reviewed
the program, told the Wall Street Journal.

Using information the CARRP obtains from law-enforcement
agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
officials determine whether or not an applicant is a “national
security concern.” But the criteria for such a label is often
broad and based on religion or origin. Attending a mosque that
was subject to law-enforcement surveillance, for example, can
cause an applicant to be blacklisted – even if he or she has
lived in the US for decades.

“This policy is creating a secret exclusion to bar many people
who are eligible for [citizenship] because… of their national
origin or religion or associations,” Jennie Pasquarella, the
ACLU lawyer who authored the report, told Mother Jones. “It’s
doing this without the knowledge of the public, without the
knowledge of applicants, and without, we believe, the knowledge
of Congress.”

According to CARRP criteria, individuals who have exhibited
“unusual” travel patterns, traveled through areas where terrorist
activity is known to occur, or have acquaintances that have been
flagged are considered national security concerns.

Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who previously
served as chief advisor to former US Attorney General John
Ashcrof on immigration law, told the WSJ that this security is
necessary to prevent another attack like the Boston Marathon
bombing.

“Ultimately this is just about politics. They don’t want to be
seen as having granted citizenship to somebody who’s going to be
the next Boston bomber,” Pasquarealla told the Associated
Press.

But the manual containing the criteria to label someone a
“national security concern” was dated April 2009 – years before
the Boston bombing occurred. And even if applicants are denied
naturalized US citizenship, legal residents and green-card
holders are still allowed to live in the US, which means the
program is not directly preventing immigrants from entering the
country.

“Before we learned about CARRP, we were seeing patterns of
delays and denials, but nobody understood what was behind
this,” Pasquarella said.

“By giving itself the authority to deny applications based on
secret criteria that it never discloses, USCIS denies applicants
the fairness they are due under the Fifth Amendment to the US
Constitution and applicatory immigration regulations,” the
ACLU report concludes.